The extraordinary and highly reproducible case of South Australia

 Over the past three years, I’ve been talking a lot with politicians. It started with the Voices for Science program, which pairs scientists with their senators and representatives to help lawmakers understand how research benefits society. I went to DC and met with the offices of Senators Lee and Romney. I shared my story about how scientific research creates jobs in Utah and leads to innovation that benefits our economy and quality of life. I was surprised how accessible they were.

Some scientists on Capitol Hill. We were so young and naive.

I was also surprised at the differences in Romney and Lee’s voting records and approaches. As a junior senator, Romney was tucked into a basement office with borrowed filing cabinets. Despite the tight quarters, his team was working tirelessly to create or support meaningful legislation on everything from child poverty to climate change. Lee had a sumptuous office with heavy leather couches and professional flyers inviting donors to eat jello with him. Like their leader, his team seemed to be scrupulously avoiding anything meaningful, instead spending their time flailing in the culture wars while complaining they weren’t being treated fairly.

When I got back to Utah, I couldn’t kick the habit. Some BYU students put our program in contact with Representative John Curtis. We met on the mountain, discussing how climate change was threatening everything from our forests to our economic future. Curtis knew his stuff and seemed to be playing the long game—educating and working with a diverse coalition.

I wasn't sure what to wear, so I put on a faux leather belt. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Next thing I knew, my student Isabella and I were traveling to the Utah Capital to share the findings of a statewide study on the health and economic costs of air pollution in Utah. The bipartisan Clean Air Caucus listened to our findings and provided feedback and guidance on how to move forward. I was impressed by their sincerity, wisdom, and generosity.

Isabella and Ben go to Salt Lake City!

During the pandemic, we changed tack and worked on COVID itself, summarizing research on what interventions are effective for the broader community and in school settings. When we found out that the insane Utah Lake islands proposal was still on the table, we changed course again, organizing what turned out to be an extremely stimulating and productive Utah Lake symposium earlier this month.

Through all these forays into translational science, one topic seems to always come up: fossil fuels. Dirty energy is at the nexus of so many of the challenges we are facing. There are multigenerational problems like climate change and the socioeconomic instability of the oil world. There are immense and immediate tragedies like the 10.2 million people who lose their lives each year to pollution from coal, oil, and gas. Fossil fuels played a crucial role lifting billions from poverty in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But two hundred years later, it’s time to move on.

Katherine Hayhoe teaches us about fossil fuels, oil derricks, and lumberjacks.

Every time I speak with a policymaker, I try to bring up how beneficial the transition to clean and renewable energy could be. If there are a thousand reasons to not like fossil fuels, there are a million to like clean energy. From cheap and equitable power to quiet and comfortable neighborhoods, the renewable revolution is going to be better than even Captain Picard imagined. Plus it is rolling in at warp 9, with a host of plausible scenarios getting us to decarbonization of the electricity grid by 2030 or 2035.

Not everyone believes this.

This email from a state representative is pretty typical in my experience:

Thanks for the energy data. I’m still not sold on the tech being there yet, but I hope it will be. California has been a cautionary tale on their energy management and the ability to handle the various loads. The tech could get there, but I can tell you that the appetite to put Utah at risk of rolling blackouts or anything close to it is pretty low. But we do believe in technology and I am hopeful it will get there and that it will be perceived as getting there (which is important in politics).

I appreciate sincere skepticism. Heck, my job literally depends on checking assumptions and thinking through things differently. However, skepticism is a pernicious form of damnation if it’s not married to a thirst for knowledge and light. There is nothing that can more completely shield us from basic truths and moral opportunities than self-serving skepticism.

If the technology isn’t there yet, then it follows that it’s not anywhere. Turns out that fully renewable, or near fully renewable systems are popping up all over the planet. Let’s take one of my favorite examples, which you may have never heard of: the state of South Australia.

A little bit bigger than Texas, South Australia is home to only 1.8 million people. Last year, it briefly reached 100% renewable energy (this temporarily created a negative cost to electricity of 9$ a MWh!), though it is averaging around 70% renewable electricity in 2021.

True, the power is extremely cheap (2.9¢ a kWh!). True, the grid is substantially more reliable and resilient than our fossil fuel one. However, the thing I find most thrilling and encouraging about South Australia is how quickly they got there. In just 12 years, they’ve gone from a coal and gas system like ours to a renewable system that is superior in almost every way. They have done so while growing their economy and earning huge dividends on their infrastructure investments.

Check out the speed of that energy transition! Full story in this article and linked report.

To be fair, the legislative groundwork did begin in the early 2000s, when they set a modest renewable energy target. However, it wasn’t until 2008 that they started working on this in earnest. They rolled out feed-in tariffs, which encouraged distributed power generation such as rooftop solar. They set renewable portfolio standards, which ensured predictable conditions for investment and business creation. They offered low-cost financing to individuals, organizations, and businesses to purchase and install the renewable tech.

But what about the intermittency problem!? What are you going to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow!?

The assumption that I hear parroted by many (including Bill Gates in his recent book), is that energy storage is not economical. South Australia has both utility scale and distributed battery storage, including the world’s (second) largest chemical battery: the Hornsdale Power Reserve. The project paid for itself in two years. That’s an ROI that even the summer sales bros can’t compete with.

The combination of distributed and centralized production has decreased strain on the power grid, allowing South Australia (and other areas that have decarbonized) to reduce maintenance and extend equipment lifetimes. It’s harder to shuffle electrons from a single location through a whole network than produce and consume it locally.

As their transportation and heating sectors electrify, South Australia has a goal of 500% renewable power by 2050 (that is to say they will be creating 5-times the electricity that they are today, and it will all be renewable). Really, really cool.

But what about California!?

On the topic of our friend to the west, I actually agree that California is a cautionary tale. They have high power prices and low reliability. However, I see that as a bureaucratic and administrative failure, not a technological one. They still primarily have centralized energy production, a large amount of interstate importation, inadequate distributed storage, and vulnerable long-distance transmission that often must be shut down because of fire risk (exacerbated by climate change).

Renewables get blamed for every grid problem, though their net effect is a large increase in resilience and reliability. Take the Texas power crisis in February. Natural gas and coal failed at twice the rate of wind, but everyone from Greg Abbott to Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the renewables (Reuters fact check here). 

Unlike California, Utah could be a national leader in this space with local production, multiple storage solutions, and an open energy market. Unfortunately, the current producers have effectively stifled deployment with anti-competitive tactics and regulation at the county to state level. Here in the valley, both Rocky Mountain Power and UMPA are doing their darndest to penalize rooftop solar, and the gas lobby scored a win last session by requiring hookups in all new developments.

There are lots of effective legislative actions that could improve the situation, including the following

1. Set statewide renewable portfolio standards. These targets create a stable regulatory environment that allows businesses and individuals to invest and deploy renewables.
2. Work with utilities across the state to ensure solvency and financing during the transition. Distributed power generation and storage is extremely frightening to many power operators who have been sold stories from the fossil fuel lobby about “death spirals” and “duck curves.” Clear talk and financial assurances would remove barriers and accelerate the transition.
3.  Provide financing, tax breaks, or direct subsidies for renewable power generation and storage. We are spending the money in any case. It’s our choice whether we pay the utility billions to build and maintain giant coal and gas plants, or support families and local businesses to create a cheaper and more reliable grid that doesn’t pollute.
4. Update the domestic building efficiency code (hasn’t been done for two cycles)
5. Invest in research and manufacturing of renewable technologies. Last year, 96% of all new electricity production was wind and solar. Fossil fuels are old news. The market for solar has almost been cornered by China. If we don’t invest in domestic production, we are going to end up with a solar OPEC sunburn.